Filed under: Publishing News
It’s 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone,” he says. “It’s only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to.”
So says one of the characters in Ben Mezrich’s book, Bringing Down the House. Bringing Down the House is marketed as the true story of the MIT students who used their brains and complicated communication system to win big in Vegas. While the core of the story is true, the book is fictionalized. It’s just another example of how publishers are willing to deceive the public for profit.
According to the Boston Globe article:
Both Mezrich and the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster’s Free Press, see nothing to apologize for. The book, they point out, was published with a disclaimer (in fine print, on the copyright page) warning that the names, locations, and other details had been changed, and that some events and individuals are composites, created from other events and individuals. Nearly all the details and facts in the book were culled from his research, Mezrich says, and where they were compressed or creatively rearranged, the fundamental truth of the story he …
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